Category Archives: Job Search

Midwinter Update

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Mea culpa for not realizing that it’d been nearly two weeks since I put anything here….though I have realized in the last week that I should have done so.

The featured image for this post is of me at a game at VMI in (I think) 2014.  If memory serves, it marked the first game in Lexington, VA, since VMI returned to the conference after leaving for 10 years or so.  One of the cheerleaders took it for me – good kids, those.  I missed them more than the games themselves when I took last season off.

Anyway, the job search came (more or less) to an end last week, when I accepted an offer to join The X Company, an an Alpharetta-based cloud services company for CPA firms.  I’m not going to pretend that this is my dream job, but it has good and bad points.  It’s a small company (just over 100 employees), which has been around since 2002, has revenues of about $12 million, a 66% growth rate over the last three years, and has been honored by Inc. 5000 five times.  That information is both good and (potentially) bad, because I’m frankly tired of working for big companies (3M, NYNEX, ComputerLand, BellSouth, AT&T) and much prefer the little ones.  During my interview, for example, the CEO and co-founder was apparently making faces at my interviewers behind my back – I like stuff like that.  A potential drawback, however, is its growth: I learned from my time at Compaid (an Inc. 500 honoree) that small, profitable, companies are ripe for takeover by the big boys.  I am really hoping that I don’t have to go through that garbage again…and the fact that The X Company’s been plugging away by itself for 15 years is heartening.

The job itself (Hosted Services Consultant 1) is a severe jump backward for me.  My paychecks will be just over half of what they were a month ago, I’ll be on the phone for much of the day, and I’m basically at the bottom of the barrel.  I think the “on the phone” part of that scenario is what disheartens me the most, but hopefully I can stay busy and interested enough to either enjoy it or advance out of it.  I still have a few leads with other companies, with jobs more suited to my experience and preferences, and I’ll wait to see if anything pans out with them.

I’ve cleared all the pre-hire hurdles with The X Company, however (background, credit, and urine checks), and am scheduled to start work next Monday morning.  In Alpharetta.  I forgot that part….my commute will go from 5 minutes to probably 45+ minutes.  No more lunches at home.

At least I’ll be doing something.  Unemployment has been, to put it mildly, sort of exhausting.  I’m still getting up at 5:30 – the cats don’t care if I’m going to work or not – but, after my walks, I’ve just been kind of sitting around playing tiddly winks.  No energy to do much of anything, and I’m usually wiped out by 5:00 in the afternoon and in bed by 7:30.

I do have some work to do in the next few days, however: cleaning the house in anticipation of a new roommate.  My friend Mary, who I’ve known for several years, is coming up on the end of her lease in March and will be taking up residence in the guestroom.  She’ll be bringing her adorable little cat, Pretty Princess, with her – which is both very cool and a bit terrifying.  I have no doubt that Joshua and Chamberlain will be quite welcoming, but Boo isn’t the friendliest kitty when it comes to meeting new friends.  It will be a fairly slow and cautious introduction, with alternating days of cats being closed up in different rooms so that everyone can get acquainted without much bloodshed.

Hey, Jenny and I combined four cats.  Hopefully, Mary and I can do the same.

The GBB is back in rehearsals as of last week (although I didn’t start until last night – had a terrible cold/flu last Tuesday night).  The board is being pretty active about looking for funding and additional performance opportunities, which is nice.  Our board has been pretty lethargic for several years, and it’ll be nice to have input and organization from more than just the 2-3 people who’ve been running the show.  We’ve got a mini-tour of GA, AL, and TN coming up in (I think) April, a return engagement to Kennesaw State in March, and a couple of other local gigs scheduled in May.  I wouldn’t mind adding two or three more gigs, but a lot of the band folks are really weird about that.  They don’t want to play more than 5-6 concerts a year.  Not sure why you’d want to be in a band if you don’t want to perform a lot….

The weather in Duluth has been, shall we say, varied as of late.  A week ago, it was 18 degrees during one of my morning walks.  Today, it was pushing 65.  I actually had the A/C on in my car yesterday.  Am still waiting for the “chill” hammer to fall, when we have temps in the 20s for a couple of weeks and I can watch my natural gas bill go through the roof.  But, so far at least, the utilities haven’t been too overwhelming.  Which is good…because I haven’t received my severance check yet, and February is going to be extremely tight, financially speaking.

That should be enough for now.  In a nutshell, it appears that I’ve survived my first layoff; my days of living alone are once again about to come to a halt; the weather is nuts; and my biggest opportunity to hike the Appalachian Trail has, at least for now, eluded me.

But I’m going to do it before I die.

Starting the Second Act

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Today’s featured image is of me sitting on the grave of Corinne Elliott Lawton (born September 21, 1846, died January 24, 1877) in Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery.  According to legend, Miss Lawton’s expression changes depending on what she thinks about her visitors.  I did not know this when I took my seat and tried to mirror her, but now that I do, I assume that she’s smiling.  Right?

If you like cemeteries, you really owe it to yourself to visit Bonaventure.  It’s an amazing place with lots of famous dead people, fantastic statuary, and long avenues of old man’s beard-draped live oaks.  There’s also generally a really nice breeze coming in off of the Wilmington River.  Great place to spend an afternoon.

So I spent a fairly quiet Christmas at home yesterday.  Did some laundry, hung out with the cats, took a couple of naps, paid some bills, and contemplated the fact that my final paycheck from AT&T will be deposited in less than two weeks.  For all intents and purposes, my final day at work was last Friday, though I’ll go in today or tomorrow to finish clearing out my desk, wipe my laptop’s hard drive, turn in my company phone and ID badges, and continue to wonder just what the hell has happened.

I had an interview with a company called The X Company last Thursday, which is somewhat heartening.  At least I got past the initial phone call and actually got to go somewhere and sit in front of two hiring managers.  That led to a background check by their boss (in Bozeman, MT).  Assuming no murders are found, maybe I’ll get an offer.  If so, I’ll be starting at the bottom again, handling support requests from CPA firms who use The X Company’s cloud services.  It’s a small company (just over 100 employees), which is nice.  Not sure how interesting it’d be, but a foot in the door is all I’m looking for at this point.

I also had a phone interview with Americold, a company that provides refrigeration services from farm to market.  110 years old.  I’d never heard of them.  That job, should I get it, would require a bit of travel (domestic) and would feature working in “environments as cold as -20.”  I told the phone interviewer that I grew up in Vermont, so that second bit wouldn’t be too much of a problem.  The call was on Thursday and I had a pretty good reference as a lead, so maybe something will come of it.

Another lead came from a bar friend of mine who works for Ricoh.  After I told him that I didn’t see any jobs that I could do listed on the Ricoh website, he went to his boss and asked.  Boss said, “Get me his resume.  Sounds like we could use him for something.”  So I sent my resume to my buddy on Thursday afternoon and we’ll see if it goes anywhere from there.

And, finally, I got an email introduction from one of my tubist friends to a guy who owns a number of IT-related businesses.  Introduced myself and told him I’d get him a resume after the first of the year.  Not hugely hopeful about that, but who knows?

Regardless of all of that, unless I get a miraculous job offer from AT&T today or tomorrow, it’s time to start over at something new.  I never envisioned myself looking for a job at 51 and I’m not entirely sure what type of job I actually WANT, considering that it’s probably going to be my last one.  Don’t see any reason to throw in the towel on my computer experience – it’s the one thing that I know I can do – but I’ve let my mind wander about other possibilities.  Teaching beginning music – to adults or little kids – is something that I’ve thought about quite a bit.  Have also considered freelance programming and/or web design (a friend of mine in Canada does the latter – basically just tweaking WordPress themes for people and sometimes updating content).  And I’ve talked with a couple of people about helping the online side of their small businesses.

Then again, maybe I should just get a license to sell insurance or houses or something….though I’m not a salesman in any sense of the word.  Ideas?  Email them to me.

So the weather in Duluth has been nuts lately.  Today is supposed to be rainy and in the 60s.  Yesterday hit 70.  Last week it was clear and in the 20s.  It’s an adventure deciding what to wear for my morning walks every day.  Will I need long-johns or just sweat pants?  Sweatshirt or light jacket (or, this morning, just a tee)?  Wool socks? No socks?  I make more decisions before 6AM than most people do all day….

Anyway, the house and car are paid for through another month, I’ve got one check coming, and hopefully a big one due in February.  Combined with my renewed Costco card (which got two workouts last week….I’ve got enough food to last a year, I think), I just might make it for a little while.  Long enough to figure out the second act, hopefully.   Here’s hoping 2017 has something good in store.

Crunch Time

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It has been chilly for the last two days, with temps in the 20s when I take my morning walk.  That being the case, I finally turned on my heat this morning (it was 48 degrees in my living room), which is something that I dread doing every year for a few reasons.  First, I’m always mildly paranoid about firing up the furnace for the first time of the year.  I have this idea that all of the accumulated crud in my ducts is going to immediately burst into flame and I’ll have fire shooting out of my ceilings with no way to put it out.  I meant to have the ducts cleaned earlier this year (not sure if that would have done much good for my paranoia), but didn’t do it.  Also haven’t had the furnace checked since last spring – my furnace people are supposed to do it twice a year, but they haven’t called me so far this winter – and frankly I’d rather not have to write them a check right now.

Second, I really hate turning on the heat because, obviously, my gas bill will now increase – and I don’t need increased bills at this point.  As of 12/28, all of my AT&T crap is going to double in price already.  I’m currently determining what I can afford to do away with.  Cable (DirecTV) is obviously the first thing to get nuked.  DTV, to put it mildly, sucks.  However, once I get rid of it, then I no longer have unlimited data on my phone, which is kind of important.  I’ll go back to having 2GB/month, which normally would be enough, but when I’m sending resumes out from my phone, data adds up quickly.

Had to take Boo to the vet yesterday because she had an ingrown claw.  Jenny and I spotted it about two months ago, and I’d been hoping that she’d bite it off herself, but she didn’t.  Came home for lunch on Thursday and noticed that she was holding up her paw.  Wasn’t complaining, wasn’t limping, wasn’t averse to putting weight on the foot – but every time she sat down, she’d hold up her paw.  So I looked at it and the claw was completely embedded in her pad.  Off to the vet.  They cut it out (bled like a stuck pig), and all’s well now.  Boo took it like a little champ.  Only cried once and settled back in at home happily after the ordeal was over.  I’m a bit worried about infection, but she’s doing a good job licking at the wound.  Hopefully that will be enough.   The bill, by the way, was just shy of $100 (she also, by law, had to get a rabies shot.  Stupid).  That’s $100 that I didn’t want to spend.

So I got a letter from Meditech yesterday informing me that I’m not going to be working for them anytime soon.  I knew it was a long shot, but I really wanted to land that job.  The rejection definitely put me in a funk.  I’ve still got decent leads at Georgia MLS and The Salvation Army, but haven’t heard back from either of them after great initial contacts.   I’ve also become convinced that applying for jobs online is sort of like pissing into a storm drain and waiting for a glass of water to come out.  So I’ve decided that, next week, I’ll start contacting recruiters.  Didn’t want to have to go that route, because the recruiters that I’ve dealt with tend  to want to put me into jobs that I don’t particularly want, but as the title says, we’re getting to crunch time here, and I need to get a paycheck lined up somewhere.  As far as I know, I’ll get a check on 12/21, get fired on 12/27, get a final check on 1/6, and then – sometime, hopefully before March – I’ll get a severance check.  The danger zone in all of that is February.  I’m glad, of course, that I managed to pay off all of my credit cards this year, but doing so depleted by basically non-existent savings.  If I don’t have a paycheck or a severance check by March 1, I can’t pay the mortgage.

To that end, I’ve investigated the possibility of getting an hourly job at Kroger or somewhere.  I really don’t need to make a bunch of money to get by (and, obviously, making a bunch of money prior to now didn’t do me a great deal of good), and I figure I can get by fairly easily if I can take home about $500/week.  The only drawback to going an hourly route, be it at a grocery store or in retail or whatever, is that I can kiss the IT gig goodbye forever if I’m out of it for too long.  Not sure how I feel about that, considering that it’s what I’ve done for the last 26 years.  I have no problem with starting a second career, but I’d rather it not be a dead-end one.

Have been wracking my brain trying to figure out a way to make money on my own.  Internet-based stuff, home computer/phone repair, something like that.  I really am trying to see this as a good thing.  A way to have a second act.  The world’s my stage and all that.  But I’ve got to take care of the cats, and that means I’ve got to keep paying the mortgage.

And the high heating bills, apparently.

The caption for my picture, by the way (which I created in the months after AT&T acquired BellSouth) is “AT&T.  Your World.  Destroyed.”

I thought it was a fitting image for the way I feel today.

One of the Seven

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Today’s featured picture, should you be wondering, is of a trail to the beach at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.  I was just perusing some random files in my OneDrive folders and I liked it.  I think I’ll just start doing that – using random shots – from now on.

Anyway, this morning is what I’d call one of the perfect 7 days that Georgia has each year.  I used to say that we had 6 perfect days, but I decided recently to increase that to a full week.  Not for any particular reason, but it’s probably close.  There are usually 4 or 5 such perfect days in the autumn and 1 or 2 in the early spring.  The rest of the year is either ungodly hot, ungodly wet, or both.  This morning, though….it’s in the high 50s, there’s a luscious breeze blowing out of the south, the humidity is very low, and the leaves in my back yard have finally turned gold.  I have the weirdest tree back there.  I think it’s a Beech, and it stays green forever.  And then, overnight, it seems, it goes gold.  It will stay that color until January or so, and then – again, overnight – all of the leaves will fall off and it’ll be dead until summer, when it instantly becomes covered in thick green leaves.  Just a strange tree.

So I’ve got the living room window open and the boys are loving life, sitting as close to the screen as they can without actually pushing it out of its frame, and smelling all that neat stuff that only cats can smell.

The job search continues for me.  I’ve been rejected so far by AT&T (two or three times), Macy’s (once), GE (twice), NCR (once), and I think by somebody else that I can’t remember.  I have resumes out to AT&T (several), OFS (a job that, if the dorks would just read my resume, they’d break their legs running to get me), RaceTrac (HQ – two possible jobs), and nice lady recruiter in Columbia, SC, has been hounding me for the last two days.  I told her to leave me alone until I’ve exhausted my Atlanta options.  Oh, and I’ve got a resume in Huntsville, AL, too.  Private K-12 needs a support dude.  I think that’d be fun.

My boss called me the other day and said that a friend of his is thinking about back-filling at job at AT&T, and he’s going to pass my name along.  That’d be cool because I’d keep my years in service and current salary (which I’m not going to get if I leave the company), but it would also kinda suck because the job is for an outage call coordinator….which means that my job would be to sit on outage calls and yell at people in order to make them fix the outage.  On the plus side, I’d get to work from home.  Also on the plus side, it’d give me more management experience.  On the minus side….come on…if you know me at all, you know that I don’t get in people’s faces.  I fix the problems for them.  In fact, that personality quirk bit me on the ass last week during my second interview for a sysadmin job at GE.  The interviewer asked me why I haven’t advanced further up the ladder, considering my experience.  I told him the truth: I don’t want direct reports.  I don’t want to be a team lead.  I like being given a problem and told to solve it.

He was looking for a team lead.  Even told me that in the follow-up rejection call.  “We really like your experience, but we want somebody to run the show.”  I thanked him and told him to keep me in mind when they need tuba players and not trumpet soloists.  He laughed and said that he would.  All in all, a pretty pleasant rejection.

I’m also considering applying for a job as the assistant manager at an AT&T retail store – a job that is two salary grades below my own and would just barely pay the bills.  Why would I do this?  A number of reasons, actually.  One, I’d keep my years in services.  This is actually important to me, if for no other reason than the fact that I’m only three years away from being able to take an early retirement.  Two, there’s nowhere for me to go in my current career path except into people management, and I have no experience with that.  If I’m going to have to make that plunge eventually, I think it’d be good for me to actually get some experience as a manager – and what less stressful learning could I get than as an entry-level assistant manager?  Three, I think I’d be damned good at it, given that I’m still a geek who likes to play with all the new toys, that (this is actually true) I’m extremely organized, that I like crunching numbers and making charts, and that (this is also true) I have phenomenal people skills in a work environment….said skills do not apply to social environments, where I can be kind of a dick, truth be told.  I’m also free to apply for that job and to turn it down if it’s offered to me without losing my severance package (because it’s a step down, I’m not obligated to accept an offer).  So I’m working on a cover letter for that gig, meant to convince the hiring manager that I’m not overqualified and that I’m not just flailing away trying to stay at AT&T, but that I’m truly interested in learning in order to maybe start a second career in my doddering years.

In a nutshell, no job yet, but I’m not defeated.  I will admit that my smoke intake has increased markedly in the last couple of weeks, and I really need to chill out as far as that goes.  Stress level is indeed high, but I’m trying to keep it under control.

What else what else….?

Oh!  In between applying for jobs and avoiding all actual work in the office, I’ve been trying to learn more about Bootstrap, which is a CSS framework for mobile-first websites.  Why?  Because it’s cool.  So there.

As a beginner project, I’ve decided to make a mileage/gasoline tracker for myself, rather than going back to one of the myriad apps that do the same thing.  If you want to watch my progress, you can do so by looking at migration.theuffp.com/mileage.  It’ll open in a regular browser.  More importantly, if you open it on your phone, it should fit on the screen perfectly, thanks to Bootstrap.   As of today, it does absolutely nothing.  You can enter numbers and click buttons to your hearts’ content, and nothing will happen.  Next week, however, I hope to start filling in the fun stuff that actually writes and reads data and displays graphs.  Then I’ll have to add some security to it.  Then I’ll be happy to set up accounts for anybody who wants to use it – and I’ll charge you.

Career #3 maybe?

In the “spending money I shouldn’t spend right now” category, I bought Battlefield 1 the other day.  It’s a video game.  First-person shooter of World War I.  Having already beaten up the Japanese and Germans in two separate WWII games, and the Russians in a Cold War game, I’ve decided to go old-school and kick some WWI butt.  Unfortunately, I need to get a video driver update before the game will work for me on my Surface Book.  Hoping to do that later today, but I’m being very careful.  All I need at this point is to break the graphics on my main computer….

And that, friends and family, is all the news that I can think to print.  Maybe next week I’ll have something better.  If not, I’ll try to just ramble on again anyway.  After nearly 50 years of doing it, the act of writing (or typing) is still a very calming experience for me.  I spend more on pens and notebooks than anyone I know.  And then I leave them at my desk and type everything that I thought I was going to write.  Weird.

Almost as weird as that stupid Beech tree.